


That Wears His Torque

by gardnerhill



Series: Torque [2]
Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Bad Poetry, Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Celts, Community: watsons_woes, Death, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, Psychological Warfare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-28 21:22:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11426436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: ”If your foe is of a choleric mind, taunt him.” – Sun Tzu, THE ART OF WAR





	That Wears His Torque

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2017 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #6, **Poetic License.** A character writes poetry (doesn't have to be good poetry). This is the conclusion to my previous Celtic AU story [Woe to Wickedness](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4473074)

King Muirios was in a rage that the cawing ravens round Seán’s gibbet could not appease.

That bastard bard had died too soon, and not soon enough – he should have lopped that pig’s head off the first day of his conquest. He’d wrested the torque of Lundun from around the dead king Shanaghan’s neck to wear for his own; he had beheaded the king’s shield-wall. But he had stupidly spared the lame scop, breaking his sword but not the traitor’s harp.

Seán’s revenge had been as simple as a ballad tune; he’d recited the deeds of Shanaghan in heroic form and castigated his new king in comical insult, until the very herdboys hummed of mighty King Shanaghan and timid Muirios the Pretender as they pissed in the field.

Of course he’d finally made the treacherous bard pay for his insult one eye and one finger at a time. The groaning, tongueless thing had finally expired at the crossroads, croaking out his last word of self-pity (“Woe”).

Then Muirios had had to expunge the song from the lips of the kingdom. It was your tongue if you were caught singing the ballad, and your children’s tongues if they learned it from you. What matter that Lundun called him Tongue-cutter Muirios, Child-slayer Muirios, Bloody-Babes Muirios, as long as they feared him?

So the singing quieted in Lundun.

But the damage was done. For traders and soldiers had passed the Lundun men singing in the fields and had carried the easy melody with them to their own kingdoms.

Muirios had ridden into the next kingdom to take it in war – and had been met by a wall of jeering men singing that damned tune in his face, their women and brats roaring with laughter. Fortified by their contempt for him, they drove him and his army back. It had been a rout; scores of soldiers’ lives lost, and not an ell’s worth of land taken.

And now he raged in his hall silent of music, throwing bones at his men’s heads.

So. They sang of Shanaghan and still revered him? They jeered his own name in tune in other lands?

Then he would meet weapon with weapon. As he would send swordsmen against their swordsmen, he would send a scop to counter this treasonous scop’s work.

Muirios ordered his brother Muirion to find a bard among the soldiers who would serve in Seán’s absence, one who would glorify his own name through song and ballad. Muirion ordered the men to do their duty by their king. But the men had seen what the king did to a scop who had angered him.

The only one who stepped forward – a timid and obsequious fellow named Gar with a reedy voice who could pluck a sheep-gut harp well enough – sang wavery nonstop paeans to Glorious Muirios, and while the king smiled and nodded everyone else snickered harder than ever behind his back. Seán’s great lament for his beloved king had belled out from his heart and his gut, reciting only the truth of Shanaghan’s victories and kindnesses. Gar’s songs were thready little scratches, full of boastful lies about Muirios’ deeds that were so blatant – extolling his hordes of gold and treasure in a barren hall, his generosity to famished and sullen peasants, his inexorable victories to those who had lost comrades in the rout – that they might as well have been written as parody.

That had been bad enough. But then Muirios knew what would really make things better: He, himself, would craft an epic song about his reign. Who better to do so than Muirios? His swordsmanship had been so cunning he had slain Shanaghan at the last; he could shoot a bow and throw a javelin. So how hard could it be, truly, to pluck some harp-strings and make a few words hang on them?

The men of Muirios’ court winced at the untuned twangs and bongs – but remembering Seán’s fate they averted their faces as they did so, and to their king they only smiled and praised him as a bard unequalled. The king was proudest of his greatest work:

_Murios is mighty._

_You cannot fight he._

_He kills all his foes._

_Blood drips where he goes._

_Kneel before your King._

_This, your song to sing!_

 

Muirios sent Gar and the other men of the court out among the Lunduners with orders for them to learn his epic, with its strange and unnatural sounds that matched at the end instead of at the proper beginning of words, and sing it at every royal occasion.

And once again Muirios mustered his army and rode to another kingdom in the opposite direction of the first one, for land and slaves and plunder. But here, too, he was met with a rolling tide of defiant alliteration from the shield-wall before him, beating like a war-drum – the undying revenge of the dead bard.

 

_Shanaghan, sure-handed; loyal Seán –_

_Pair never parted, the heart of the people._

 

_Muirios mumbles forgotten misdeeds_

_And flees, a spider in fear for his life._

 

_Long live King Shanaghan, true lord of Lundun –_

_Woe to wickedness that wears his torque!_

 

Muirios saw red. The torque – HIS torque, taken in battle, taken from a dead man, HIS rightful emblem of kingship – seemed to tighten around his throat. He roared his men to sound the horns and drums, to lower spears and swords, to charge.

But an army that has no heart for the fight has already lost, no matter their size or weapons. The men wanted home, and work, and their heavy bronze songs once again, not the screechy tin of the new and ghastly praise-chants. Again they were routed, slain and driven back. Many of the men fled back to Lundun.

Screaming, Muirios spurred his horse after them, fleeing the heavy beat of the last line Sean had driven into his song over and over like bronze studs ringing a shield, roaring behind him from the enemy army:

 

_Woe to wickedness that wears his torque!_

_Woe to wickedness that wears his torque!_

_Woe to wickedness that wears his torque!_

 

To his land, his kingdom, the one he’d taken by slaying King Shanaghan in battle with his brother’s aid, his –

A dark wall approached him from Lundun. A single word, a vicious heartbeat, a spear jabbed in the air, a baying warhound. The last word of Seán the bard:

“WOE! WOE! WOE! WOE!”

And it was Lundun, all those who had not gone to battle – a shield-wall of women and youths and maids and crippled soldiers and old people – holding hay-pikes and scythes and flails, torches and weapons wrested from the turncoat soldiers – advancing on Muirios, howling as his army had not.

He wheeled his horse to shout a formation … and found not an army but the husbands and sons and fathers of those Lunduners at his back, armed, and chanting a song that rolled off their lips from their hearts and their guts.

The captain Muirion deftly twirled his spear to backstab his own brother as he had Shanaghan during his combat with Muirios, but before he could act he was dragged off his horse and dispatched by a squad of old women carrying spindles and weaving-shears.

Who slew Muirios at the end? No one person struck the blow. All were guilty, so none were guilty. It was indeed a pity that wise King Shanaghan, who could find wickedness wherever it resided and name it, was not there to deduce which had been the deadly strike – the stableboy’s flung horse-shoe, or the jab by Gar’s sword, or the stab in his neck from the raging mother of a tongueless child. But everyone who struck him was chanting Seán’s last word from his last song, and that is why Lunduners say that it was a dead man who killed the pretender-king to avenge his beloved ruler.

The people of Lundun, freed of their petty tyrant and his mercenaries, could finally take down Seán’s weather-beaten bones from the crossroad without fear of punishment. They bathed the bard’s remains and bound them in white linen, and buried them in the sacred mounds. And atop them they laid King Shanaghan’s torque.


End file.
